Autumn Bridge (68 page)

He did not have the slightest idea of how to behave with a woman who knew neither how to lead nor how to follow. In contrast to that stark and frightening reality, that she was an American and a Christian missionary faded away into utter insignificance.

Emily heard a knock at the door. Genji was the only one who ever knocked. Everyone else followed the established custom of announcing their presence by voice. He knocked in deference to her.

In her heightened emotional state, this simple realization brought tears to her eyes. It was a moment before she was in sufficient control of herself to say, “Come in.”

Genji saw that Emily was already in bed, the quilt pulled up to her neck and tucked under her chin. He hoped she was not naked. Charles Smith had told him that Western women preferred to make love completely unhindered by clothing. Genji didn’t believe him, of course. Smith was a natural jester, and often said things to shock his listeners rather than to accurately inform them. The only woman who had regularly been naked with him was Heiko. Such adventurous disregard for propriety had been part of her charm. Other women made love in traditional seductive disarray and dishabille. There was art to that. There was no art at all in nudity.

Or was there? Was it not likely that this was yet another aspect of life outsiders perceived in an entirely different way? There was no nudity in Japanese art, and precious little of it even in explicit sexual renderings, while in the West, nudity proliferated in statuary and paintings that adorned even the official buildings of their capital cities. Or was he confusing the ancient West with the modern, the Greeks and the Romans with the British and the Americans?

Genji sat on his side of the bed — Emily was noticeably positioned entirely on one half of it — and removed his outer kimono. For the wedding, he had dressed as usual in the Japanese fashion. Emily had asked if she should wear the wedding kimono that came in the Mongol trunk, but Genji had said no. He knew she would not be comfortable in it. And he was doubtful of how she would look in a kimono. Her configuration — protuberant in the extreme at breast and hip, constricted in equally dramatic measure at her waist — was too extravagant to provide the proper structure over which a kimono should flow. She had looked perfectly right in her wedding dress, as he knew she would. It was one thing to adapt. It was quite another to attempt to be what one was not. This was a lesson he and his countrymen would do well to remember in the time to come.

He was about to slip beneath the quilt when he remembered another thing Smith had told him. Western women, he had said, preferred intimacy in darkness.

Darkness? Genji said. You mean night rather than day?

Smith said, I mean darkness. At night, with no illumination.

Genji said, With no illumination other than moonlight or starlight.

No, Smith said. In a closed room, with pulled shades and curtains to shut out the heavens, and without generated light of any kind.

But it is impossible to see anything in such conditions, Genji said.

Exactly the point, Smith said.

Genji did not believe him, but he had learned that the unbelievable was not always to be ruled out with outsiders.

He said to Emily, “I will snuff the candle.”

Emily had been thinking about this as Genji undressed. Thank God, he had not undressed completely. She longed for the cover of darkness, yet she feared it as well. Without any visual anchor, subject to who knew what physical invasion and abuse, she could easily become disoriented and panic.

“Please,” she said, “let it burn.” She would look at his face, and find what comfort she could there. The man she adored was certain to disappear from view as his animal nature triumphed over his better self. But until then, she would look into his eyes, and she would see the goodness within him.

Genji lay on his side of the bed, propped up on an elbow. Emily stared at him like a condemned prisoner awaiting her executioner’s blow. Surely love was a jest of the gods, that it could make two people who loved each other so afraid.

Emily had undone her hair. It pooled on the pillow under her like an abundance of the gold filaments used in the best embroidery. The white silk bedding complemented her fine, pale skin. Her dramatic features were balanced by the innocence of their presentation; she used no cosmetic enhancements at all. Those eyes, which had once dizzied him with their strangeness, he now saw were nearly magical reflections of the boundless sky, and the ocean in its brightest days. How had he ever thought her any less than beautiful? He had been blind.

Genji pulled the edge of the quilt gently away from her chin. Her shoulders tightened briefly, then relaxed when he stopped without uncovering her completely. She had worn a sleeping kimono to bed. The pale blue silk, the color of her eyes, rose and fell at her breast as she breathed.

Genji slowly drew a line with his fingers from her throat to her waist along the skin at the inner edge of her kimono, opening it slightly. Her flesh was soft and fever hot. Blood rouged her cheeks and eyelids.

Her breath quickened. She turned her face away.

Genji touched her cheek and she faced him once again.

He said, “May I kiss you?”

That he would ask, that he would say it so shyly, it was more than she could bear. Tears welled and fell. “Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes.

His kiss was so light and subtle, it was little more than a warm breath upon her lips, yet it made her shiver.

She had to tell him. She had to tell him now, before silence became a lie.

“I am not a virgin,” she said.

“Neither am I,” Genji said, and kissed her again.

Sometimes, when she first woke up in the morning, Old Abbess Jintoku did not wake up when she should, in the twenty-seventh year of the Showa Emperor, but in Meiji 15, or Taisho 6, or, most often these days, Komei 21. Meiji 15 was the year Makoto Stark first came to the temple. Taisho 6 was memorable because Japan became a full-fledged power then, as one of the victors in the Great War. She thought she awoke so frequently in Komei 21 because that was when the second battle of Mushindo occurred, the one that took Lady Hanako’s life, made Jintoku abbess, and — and what was the other thing? There was one more. Old Abbess Jintoku had been thinking about it just as she woke this morning, then promptly forgot it. Ah, well, it would come to her. Or it would not. It mattered little either way.

She sat patiently on her cushion as her attendant nun and three guests busied themselves around her in the small living room of her cottage. Such a crowd for so small a space. Especially since the guests had brought several large pieces of equipment with them, including what looked like a movie camera.

“Are you ready, Reverend Abbess?” the young nun said.

“I am always ready. Is there anything in particular you would like me to be ready for?”

“That’s great,” the man in the flashy Western suit said. “Let’s get her to say that on camera. Hey, Yas, set the camera up here right away.”

His hair was cut in a manner that had become popular with the American Occupation, rather long and greasy, gangsterish and somewhat effeminate at the same time. She didn’t know him, and she didn’t like him. Not because of his clothes or his hair, but because of the way his eyes glittered and shifted about. That was the way young men’s eyes had been during the war — not the Great War, which had ended thirty-five years ago, but the Great East Asia War, which everyone now had to call the Great Pacific War, or World War II, by command of the Americans. Young men’s eyes had been that way because before they went off to die in airplanes or ships, they were given little white pills, which made sleep and food unnecessary, and made them eager to crash into American ships in suicide attacks.

“That will be difficult,” the nun said.

“Why?” a young woman asked.

She was dressed in a style similar to the man Jintoku didn’t like. Her clothes were of the American type, particularly gaudy in her case, with a skirt that exposed the better part of rather fat and unshapely calves. She wore an abundance of makeup that would have suited a Ginza whore. Her hair was an elaborate mass of immobile curls called a perm. Jintoku didn’t dislike the young woman the way she did the young man. She felt sorry for her instead. Her grotesque distortion was no doubt due to the man, if not this one, then another. Women always did what men wanted, even when what they wanted was bizarre and harmful. How sad.

The nun said, “The Reverend Abbess never repeats herself.”

“We’ll just ask her the same question,” the man said.

“She never answers a question with the same answer,” the nun said.

“What a character,” the man said, as if Jintoku were not there. “That’s great, too. We’ll have terrific footage for the program.”

Jintoku said, “What program?”

The nun said, “Remember, Reverend Abbess? Today, the reporters from NHK Television are here to interview you. You’re going to be on their special program,
The Centenarians of Japan
. It’s part of a celebration of the first anniversary of the end of the American Occupation.”

“Yes, Reverend Abbess,” the reporter said, “Japan is free again.”

“Japan was never free in the first place,” Jintoku said. “Great Lords ruled before and they rule now.”

“I got that,” the camera operator said.

“Great,” the reporter said, “but we can’t use it. It sounds too much like a militaristic reference.”

“Doesn’t she know feudalism ended a century ago?” the woman made up like a whore said.

“The Reverend Abbess was speaking metaphorically,” the nun said. It wasn’t the same nun who had been assigned to her last month. Jintoku wore her out. This one was still fresh. She was also young. Perhaps she would outlast the others.

“Anyway, let’s get on safer ground,” the reporter said. He looked at his notes, refreshed his memory, and spoke as if reciting. “Reverend Abbess, you are one of the most prominent one-hundred-year-old citizens in our country. As Founding Abbess of Mushindo Abbey, you are a vital link with our valued traditions. Japan has more centenarians per capita than any other country in the world. Do you think this is a result of the deep spiritual interest that so many Japanese have?”

“I think it is a kind of curse,” Jintoku said. “We Japanese are slow learners. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again, war after war, killing everyone in sight. So the gods and Buddhas have condemned us to long life, to contemplate at greater length the error of our ways.”

“I got that,” the camera operator said, “but I guess we can’t use it, either.”

“No, maybe we can,” the reporter said. “It’s antimilitarism and properly penitent. It could go.”

“No one should live so long,” Jintoku said. “Everyone I knew when I was young has been dead for thirty years. And there are too many years to keep in their proper place.”

The camera operator shot the reporter a questioning look. The reporter moved his finger in a circular movement, and the camera operator kept his camera rolling.

“Surely, you have found religion to be a solace, to others as well as yourself?”

“I don’t know anything about religion.”

“You’re too modest, Reverend Abbess. For most of a century, you have been a much respected religious leader. Many thousands have come to their beliefs through your guidance.”

“Don’t blame me for what anyone believes,” Jintoku said. “The Mushindo sect teaches liberation from delusion. It has nothing to do with belief, just practice. You do or you don’t. Very simple. In the meantime, you can believe or disbelieve whatever you wish. Belief has nothing to do with reality.”

“Well, that’s a novel view, Reverend Abbess. Certainly different from what the abbots of the great temples and shrines of Japan would say.”

“Not really,” Jintoku said. “One of the Zen Patriarchs of ancient times — or was it a Kegon master? — put it quite succinctly. A famous saying around the time of the Opium War, when the British forced the Chinese to buy opium. He said, ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses.’ ”

The reporter drew his hand across his throat in a cutting gesture.

The camera operator looked up. He said, “I’d already stopped when she called the British drug dealers.”

“Amazing,” the reporter said. “She managed to insult our British allies, defame the Zen and Kegon churches, and spout outlawed Communist propaganda all in three sentences.”

“Ask her about the books,” said the woman with the helmet-hard curls and the blood-gash lipstick. “Everybody loves those books.”

“That’s right,” the camera operator said. “And it’s a real link with our nation’s hallowed traditions.”

“All right,” the reporter said. He looked doubtful. “Fumi, show her some of the books. She might need them to revive her memory.”

The garishly made-up woman, whose face was quite pretty beneath it all, put a colorfully illustrated children’s book into Jintoku’s hands. It was the fairy tale about Peach Boy, a superhuman cherub born in a peach. The pictures were bright and cheerful. Even the demons looked friendly.